


The Consolations

by Kiki023



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 03:05:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15282192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiki023/pseuds/Kiki023
Summary: An aging Bellamy struggles with bitter memories.





	The Consolations

I will resist my natural inclination to catastrophize. 

Settled deep into my rocking chair, uncertain of whether the incessant creaking that follows my gentle swaying is that of the chair or of my bones, I sit here perched on the cusp of something I have often feared and loathed but can hardly fathom. I write with the fervent desire, and probable delusion, that whatever it is I have to say may be of some usage to posterity; but somehow I know that I write only for myself. My hand shakes in the dim light of my desk lamp, and the frail lines that trace the contours of my skin are matched only by the hollowness that has given some distorted form to a face I no longer recognize. Pen scratches against paper so that in the silent dark draped over me there is only a tiny scribble screaming out against the endless void that slithers ever smoothly towards me like vines over a Roman wreck. It is the infinite space of death, but I am getting ahead of myself. 

Presiding over a family is like presiding over an empire. Intrigue, dissent, revolt. Barbarians at the gate. Fires to be stamped out. If time has diminished the vitality of my capacities, it has not deprived me of my fondness for historical metaphor. But I did preside over a family – once. It is funny how in the fog of old age reflections of a more youthful nature strengthen its hold over a weakening mind, as if to torment me with the knowledge that all hindsight affords and yet, tantalizingly, dangle the perceptive remedies that would have relieved me (us?) of so, so much pain. And that perceptiveness itself brings with it a searing indictment of a life lived and the many lives that I, in the ignorance so generously afforded to men and women of youth, might have lived, and the many lives that I have outlived. 

What good is it now, to write and to reflect and to drown in a past that has receded ever further into the depths of mind and history? If there is one thing that I have learned, it is that History is impossible. One may capture the manifest machinations of grand personalities and the moving parts that collectively make up History’s mantle, but one cannot hope to capture the mind in the totality of its contradictions, its division of selves, the passions of hatred and love, a quiet moment of kindness, and the silence that follows death. I know this because I have seen it. And as this century grows older I find myself growing older with it and see in its termination that of my own.

So what is the purpose of my writing? It is borne of an irritation that has grown into a cancer so malignant that I have no recourse but to allow it its due. It is an anger that claws up at me from the heart, a personal History that refuses to relieve me of the bonds with which I have kept myself captive for so many years. It is the parade of faces that have stampeded through the course of my life and have bequeathed to me things I once thought to hold dear and left me bereft of those things that actually mattered. Those faces themselves, of friends, of family, that are now gone like sunken rocks in a gloomy lake, those voices I can hardly remember save for the ethereal haze of restless nights spent in thrall to shallow dreams whose content slips away upon awakening. Shadows stalk the room and when I turn to them they meld with the dark and in the recesses of my mind it is those memories that do the same when I seek to shine an inner light upon them. 

I do not believe in ghosts nor in monsters under the bed. I did not believe in them when the mere act of looking dispelled them from the dusty space under my sister’s bed, nor when I opened the door to her closet and scared away the bogeyman with fortitude and lamplight. I suppose I was a hero in her eyes and I suppose I used that to my advantage. She was a ball of excitable energy and whizzed around with the ferocity of a shooting star and I, in my growing resentment, directed that combustible energy at our mother, who wouldn’t so much as look at me without a sneer. Perhaps she saw my father in me and being the offspring of such contemptible stock was hardly any way to endear myself to her, and yet I cannot help but feel the old stirrings of a once potent rage when I think of her. She was kind and gentle and warm, and she showered my sister with a reserve of affection that I had not thought her capable of. Envy grew like a thousand multiplying needles until I too could not restrain the invective that poured from my mouth when it should have been Livy’s histories or Cinderella. The poison I shoveled into her head turned her into a personal machine gun that I hoped would be forever at my disposal; in the end it lasted no longer than high school, and whatever Octavia is today, I know that I’m at fault. 

The notion of responsibility is a funny one. After Octavia’s father had long gone and the stench of alcohol was replaced by that of vomit, after spent nights nursing our mothers’ various addictions, she came to see that abdication of parenthood, that abrogation of the sacrosanct pact that ties mother to daughter, as a rejection of personhood. In her silent tears, in her mumbled whispers to me in the dead of night as I rocked her through another terror, she would ask me what she had done wrong, and I would tell her that she had been born. Our mother was much too incompetent to be Medea, so I shouldered the burden for the three of us, and they were none the wiser; fear and concern morphed insidiously into hatred until punctured innocence became an infected wound far too deep to ever mend. I did not realize how Octavia’s hardened exterior would come to backfire upon me, but at the time I weaned some small satisfaction from my hidden triumph, from her rejection of the woman whose striving to take back the reins of her life became an excuse to leave us to the wolves. 

Sometimes I feel as if something has wormed its way into my head, the way I can sit back and gaze upon the distant expanse of my life with indifference. I know I felt much more strongly once. Perhaps it is the withering assault of Time that takes from us the ability to summon those emotions inextricably bound up to the memories they accompany. Perhaps memory is less like a muscle that must be exercised and more like a seal stamped into wax, in which case diminution is only to be expected. After all, who among us remembers our childhood with perfect clarity? As the years move on the past is like a shore stowed away behind a curtain of mist whose opacity only increases with each passing day. And yet every day the bonds I thought I had severed serve to tighten their grip over me, until I can do no more than turn fitfully in my restlessness and drift towards an accounting that has begun to feel like a reckoning. 

When she brought home that man – no, that boy – the first thing I felt was rage. The way his eyes looked impassively over the wreckage that was our home, the way he coolly stuck out his hand and stared straight into my eyes. I knew – I thought – I had been too complacent. 

“Bell,” she nudged me. “This is Lincoln.” 

Sure, it was Lincoln. But that meant very little to me. After our dinner had passed in tense silence and a bitter coldness had come to settle over us until every minute movement drew from her a sharp glance, she kissed him on the mouth and hurried him out the door, before directing the full force of her ire unto me. 

“What the _fuck_ Bell?!” 

I didn’t like him. So what? No brother wants to see his sister used. In that regard I am no different from any other. 

“What?”

“You _know_ what!” 

Did I know? I feign no hypotheses. All I saw was another barbarian who had come to ransack a home that I had struggled for so long to put in order. I spent the rest of the night looking for her after finding her bed empty. She was like that, Octavia, headstrong and stubborn, like her brother. 

And perhaps that is why she was able to make friends with so many strong-willed people, and why I, try as I did, was never able to. 

What is it to be a friend? I suppose it is more than utility, which would compromise the shared characteristics that supposedly draw one to another. Do opposites attract? Maybe in a material sense. But I know enough now to know that it is a connection of the soul that one must make, if one is ever to understand another. And if this is the case, then to understand another is to understand oneself. And I could not do that, not until it was too late. Not when Octavia’s outbursts, whose incipient sparks I had nursed in the comfort of her bedroom, began to imperil herself. Not when the loose bonds of her childhood friendships hardened into something more concrete and lasting. And not when those childhood friends became mine too. 

It was an almost endless array of faces that streamed in and out of our home in those earlier years. Maybe I wasn’t as concerned as I should have been, when the gleaming smile of one elementary student my sister had brought home dampened upon taking in the extent to which our home was already corroding under the strain of dysfunction. One kid replaced the next, never to return, until I was compelled to swoop in and calm the sniffles that emanated from my sister’s room. Her brown eyes glimmered with unshed tears. 

“Nobody likes me,” her lips trembled and a trickling tear carved a path down her cheek. 

“It’s not you,” I ran a soothing hand down her back. “They just don’t get it.” 

But some did get it, eventually. When she brought home Clarke, proudly displaying her to me as if she had captured some exotic blonde species from the jungles of junior high, I could hardly recall a time in which I had seen a wider grin splayed across her face. 

“Bell!” she hopped up to me, brimming with the unbridled enthusiasm of ecstatic youth that knows not what to do with the boundless energy percolating within it. “This is Clarke!” 

So it was Clarke. Friend, confidante, one-time lover, even family; all to my sister of course. To me she was just Clarke, and I am beginning to suspect, just as I am beginning to suspect that those ghosts and monsters under the bed and in the closet that I once rejected are in fact real, that I may have even loved her, once.

But I am getting ahead of myself.


End file.
